A variety of specialized flooring materials have been developed for interior and exterior use. Indoor applications are especially varied, including everything from granite and marble to hardwoods and rubber compositions. Hardwood floors for interior use typically range from individual, unfinished strips or boards that are sanded and stained or otherwise finished after being installed, to pre-finished boards and various parquet styles. The individual boards, in particular, used in hardwood flooring usually have stress relief channels cut in their underside, and tongue and groove configurations along the side edges. The major developments in interior hardwood flooring, however, have been related to the use of durable finishes, and not to the basic structural design of the wood strips.
Wood flooring materials for exterior use, such as in decks and the like, have undergone very little change since their introduction. Up until fairly recently, wood flooring for exterior use was typically found on covered porches, and was not used in constructions fully exposed to weather conditions. These floors were very close in structure and appearance to interior flooring, and generally included tongue and groove construction and other features used indoors. The same boards might even be used both indoors and outdoors, for example, with a painted surface on the boards used outdoors to aid in resisting weather.
Construction materials and methods for exterior decks and porches changed dramatically with the advent of chemically treated lumber, which enabled exterior structures to be fully exposed to the weather. The chemically treated lumber used in these structures is generally produced by subjecting untreated lumber to a process whereby the chemicals are caused to penetrate into the lumber by a vacuum or pressure technique. This makes them weather-resistant, and provides much greater flexibility in architectural style than previously used materials for exterior construction.
However, very little change has been made in the basic design of the wood building materials used in such exterior constructions. For instance, flooring or decking used in exterior decks comes in essentially only two configurations, 2.times.4 and/or 2.times.6 or 2.times.8 lumber, and so-called 5/4 decking boards. All of these flooring materials are essentially rectangular in cross-sectional configuration. Additionally, the 5/4 decking boards have slightly rounded top edges.
In all conventional flooring materials known to applicant, the top and bottom horizontal surfaces of these flooring materials are flat and planar. As a result, water tends to stand on the surface of the decking material, causing it to deteriorate more quickly than it otherwise would. Heretofore, the solutions to this problem included spacing the decking boards so that water can drain between them, and frequent treatment with water-proofing materials.
Further, the process used to cut such lumber from logs can produce inferior product on the outermost boards, often leading to scrap.
Consequently, there is need for an exterior decking board that is shaped to shed or drain water, and which possesses all the desireable attributes of conventional decking materials, such as ease of use and handling, low cost, and comfort, and which at the same time can result in better utilization of material as the boards are cut from a log.